Negative Externalities

My son has a blog

2005-12-23T18:35:00.000-08:00

Silly Squirts

I think he is trying to be vaguely dirty. I helped him set up the blog and when it came to naming it he told me it's a brand of ketchup (true enough).

Lately, he's taken to working the word "muff" into every conversation. He had heard some pun on That 70's Show and he asked me what a muff was. I took the cowards way out and told him it was a piece of fur sewed into a circle that women used to keep their hands warm (true enough). My reward for this piece of disembling is that he has taken to asking women if they like muffs. If they like putting their hands in muffs. I can't decide if he knows exactly what he is doing and having fun with people, or if he knows I was telling a half-truth and desperately trying to figure out if his suspicions of what a muff are on track.

What does the Iraqi parliament do again?

2005-12-20T07:47:00.000-08:00

This is a serious question.

Abu Aardvark was wondering why the Arab media didn't pay much attention to the Iraqi elections. I know why I didn't. As far as I can tell the Iraqi "parliament" doesn't do anything except dole out money to their friends, while any decision of consequense is up to the U.S. ambassador. I thought maybe I was being unneccesarily mean to them as Father of Aardvarks is pretty sharp on these matters. So I stuck phrases into google trying to find them voting on *anything*. They had their little dust-up about the constitution where after some serious brow-beating from our man in Baghdad a result popped out. As far as I know that's the only business the Iraqi parliament has ever conducted.

By way of contrast, I threw Chechen parliament into google and out popped "Chechen parliament" and they vote on all sorts of things. They are things that seem odd for a Chechen parliament to be doing, things like voting in resolutions to order the seperatists to disarm and go home after Putin flew in and told them to do that. They voted to ask Russia if they could rename the rubble of Grozny after Akhmad Kadyrov, a pro-Moscow death squad leader, later President who got wacked by a seperatist death squad. They do at least go through some nominal functions to appear to have some level of autonomy. There have been three of these elections now and the elected body has never done *anything*.

Once upon a time in New Orleans

2005-12-10T21:43:00.000-08:00

When I was about twenty-two, I had a newborn son and a girl who had a father who was living in Tampa Bay. He wanted to see his grandson and a vacation sounded nice. We got some urban legend and medical mumbo-jumbo that made us leary of flying down there with an infant out of concern for his eardrums. We took the City of New Orleans train via Amtrak and a bus to Tampa. One thing I can recommend for this mode of transportation is that you will get to see every bad neighborhood in America on a north/south trajectory because of it's proximity to the tracks and even better an amazing, moving graffiti show. My personal favorite was "Fuck a fish tank". I'm still not sure what it meant but I've got photos somewhere.

I had never met the old man. When I met him, he was incredibly engaging. Intelligent, interesting, had a million stories that would have you hanging off the edge of your seat. I had been told that he and my baby mama's mother had broken up because he was an abusive sadist, but damn was that guy cool and I sort of had it pushed to the back of my mind. He was a Vietnam vet and my dad was a Marine crew chief on a Huey and prone to spazing out so I sort of had a pass for him already built in.

The last night we were there (it wasn't supposed to be) I heard fighting and then silence, then I heard gasping. I'm thinking fucking but it didn't sound quite right. I said "what was that?" and what turned out to be my ex-wife said "He was choking her, what do you think it was?". Oh. Well, it was time to get the hell out of Dodge. She was right as confirmed by later phone conversations. One way or another I figured it was time to go home.

So we get back to New Orleans to take the train back to Chicago. There is this guy there that wants to know if I want to buy pot. I smoked back then and had just bought a piece in Ybor City and it sounded good. I said "Sure, can you sell me an eighth?". He responded "You want an eight-ball? I can get an eight-ball!!!". I obviously should have ended the conversation there but I didn't. Supposedly the weed was in his taxi and we were going to do the deal there. We got in the back seat and as soon as I stepped in a crack head materialized in the driver's seat and we were moving. I was informed that the pot wasn't actually in the car but somewhere else. If you know New Orleans at all you understand exactly how quickly you will disappear into the ghetto if you travel east from the train station.

Within a matter of seconds I was in the thick of a city that I thought I knew. No friendly guy offering you a forty-ounce margarita or daquiri from curbside on the corner. Suddenly it was incredibly desperate hordes of humanity trying to sell you crack or ass. You either drive through them or they are going to bust into the car to pitch one or the other.

When you look out the side window you can see the shitty housing. The houses have no insulation and there are cracks in the slat boards wide enough that it makes a sort of kaleidoscope where you can see about a tenth of what is going on in the house. I've been to Negril, Jamaica and it wasn't quite as desperate as ghetto New Orleans.

To wind down the story, I gave up a twenty to buy pot. When the guy came back I was unsuprised to learn that he had been unable to procure such a substance there, but had picked up some freebase and we had to go somewhere else. The guy started smoking out of broken glass pipe and he said "hold this for me". Human beings being dumb things who are likey to respond the same way to a grenade offered to them, I did stick out my hand and was offered a couple lumps of crack and a bunch of blood from where the guy had been high, cut himself to hell and didn't notice. I just pretented to be sort of dumb and told him I had a train to catch and if he could drop me off I'd be grateful and if he got back with the pot it would be a bonus. He pretended to believe in the whole imaginary scenario and I got back and counted myself lucky I'd got back.

The point of the story is what exactly should be done in New Orleans? I seriously have no idea. I'm extremely hostile to the city leadership which apparently believes in some fantasy world where New Orleans could be some new Disney World or at least a southern Atlantic City. The thing is Atlantic City would be an improvement on what was there. What was there was a shithole people were too poor to escape from when it started to drown them. Is there a serious policy solution out there that seriously questions what was there and what could be there?

It starts..

2005-12-08T17:11:00.000-08:00

Sadly No was wondering about the silence of the Sami Al-Arian verdict from the usual suspects. I knew damn well they weren't just going to sit in silence after their witchhunt. Obviously, if a jury finds their victim innocent, the problem lies with outmoded 9/10 ideas like "trials".

I ran across this a bit later. I can't decide which was more nauseating. The post or this tidbit in the comments:

Oh! How I rue the day when a tough minded Janet Reno who put away terrorists like Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and Ramzi Yousef was replaced by the terrorist sympathizer and a generally incompetent buffoon Asscroft and now Gonzalez who have dropped the ball on Sami Al-Arian, the Lackawanna Six, Sami Omar Al-Hussayen and the Detroit Al-Qaeda terror cell trial.Can we please get some patriotism and competence back in the Justice Deparment! I guess we will have to wait till 2008 before we can finally get a Justice Department which will be serious about prosecuting terrorists.

Marc Cooper really fucking sucks

2005-12-04T20:09:00.000-08:00

Just thought I'd get that off my chest.

I didn't have much use for him before he tied his star to the odious, ill-fated, turd whose name changes so often I'll not bother trying to identify it. Truth be known, he's an unimportant gasbag who had fairly well escaped my memory until I happened to come across this:

"Perhaps you would like me to catalogue the mirror wingnuttiness that I bump into day-to-day at my more respectable job with The Nation: writers who believe that there’s a burgeoning national Russ Feingold for President movement; that Castro’s Cuba is really more democratic than Schwarzenennger’s California; that it’s a pity the Soviet Union collapsed; that a new book critical of Mao must be written by the CIA; that it’s just fine and dandy to have an anti-war movement managed by acolytes of Kim-Il Sung; that we mst provide material support to the armed resistance in Iraq so on and so on ad infinitum. I find that stuff to be equally crazy."

I'll just refrain from calling bullshit on his whole idiotic strawman routine where he makes up some leftist strawman (and it is made up, some place that according to him is a crypto-Spartacus League/Marcyist communist front wouldn't give him a salary over and above his LA Weekly six figures to bitch about and complain that he needs to hang out with LGF scum to make ends meet).*

Take a look at his blog and notice just how quick the ideological shift changed under his feet as he watched the prospects of The Blog That Shall Not Be Named and Probably Won't Exist Much Longer sink and flounder. His position and tenor shifted in incredible ways. This moment in time is something that should be preserved in amber. He shifted gears in an incredible, newspeak fashion where if you scroll to the bottom you can find him decrying the PC fascism of refering to the Iraqi resistance as "the Iraqi resistance", to throwing spitballs at Rumsfeld for his foolish games at redefining the aforementioned as "“enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government” in the current. Does he really believe in anything?

* Ok, I'll bitch a bit. I know some hardcore anti-imperialists and they support Tariq Ali's notion that the only solution is to "support" the resistance. I find this formulation unacceptable for a number of reasons that are unimportant here but when pressed I've never found anyone who didn't blink when asked if they should actually do anything in the real world to "support" the resistance. I can't imagine any of them having (or even willing to take) a job at The Nation.

One Yanki's analysis of why the Venezuelan military went left

2005-12-02T20:29:00.000-08:00

The Bitch posed this question on LBO talk today. As I am just way too au currant to be seen on an internet geezer tech like a mailing list, I thought I'd address the question here.

I've never been to Venezuela, the following is the result of reading random bullshit on the internet, a number of conversations with Venezuelan (not one of them a Chavitista, I've yet to run into a Venezuelan who didn't hate Chavez in the U.S. and I never have and probably never will see Venezuela), and my own wishful thinking and biases.

The short answer is Chavez himself. He was part of the officer class. He speaks their language and he isn't dealing with them as an outsider. He has made the militaries concerns a top priority since he came to power in 1998. It was probably his relationship with the palace guard especially, but more generally with the military that allowed him to return to power after the coup. Certainly, the million strong demonstrations outside the palace during the short lived Carmona regime created the situation necessary, and maybe the country couldn't have carried on with that sort of resistance, but they seemed very willing to wait the whole thing out regardless of the costs. The crowd never stormed the gate and most likely never would have. It wasn't them that personally got rid of the thieves (literally, Carmona and friends broke into the safe and stole all the cash before heading for Florida). It was a palace guard that knew and liked Chavez because he dealt with them as fellow soldiers instead of the help.

After that, the government came back and the most of the military could be persuaded because if not so much the left but Bolivarianism is a strong sentiment that Chavez appealed to successfully and that the Carmona regime could never lay claim to with their open ties the U.S. and how much it just smelled like imperialism. The ones that weren't were outnumbered and purged to go simmer with the rest of the opposition from the oil industry. They are quite literally crazy at this point, they don't even follow the international conventional wisdom that Chavez has "bought off" the poor (like that's not the entire point of socialism). They have lost their cushy oil jobs or such, and live in a fantasy world where Chavez is universally detested and they are the victim of a wildly rigged voting system.

So apparently the key seems to be somewhat ugly. Socialism in South America requires someone with military credibility and a willingness to outbid military expenditures from the right.

A fat old Jewish guy who lives in the projects has a blog

2005-12-01T15:33:00.000-08:00

and it's good!

Check it out.

Especially for this damn good story.

Release the memo already

2005-11-29T07:43:00.000-08:00

I am really shocked at the American media's reaction to the almost certain revelation (given that if the memo didn't exist, there wouldn't be threats to use the State Secrets act) that Bush was set to bomb Qatar over Al-Jazeera's refusal to quit doing their jobs and go hunt for greatful Iraqis who were enjoying their Freedom Bombing®. My god, you would think at least the field reporters would be kicking up somehow. If nothing else you would think reporters would stick together against targeted assassinations of journalists.

Maybe they know it won't matter, because most Americans have this perception of Al-Jazeera (including liberals) as being crude propaganda. Reference anything they put out, and your reaction is likely to be "Oh, Al-Jazeera said it". AJ is staffed with almost entirely ex-BBC staff and they are organized in an entirely similar set of journalistic ethics and conduct. It's an Arab broadcast with an Arab audience. Just as the BBC,no matter what it's standards are, has a point of view, so does AJ but that doesn't make it's reporting worthless. What matters in the end is the accuracy and the quality of the information you present. You can't simply dismiss reporting because it has an ideological edge (and anyone who thinks the American or British media didn't have an agenda is just insane). When it comes to Iraq their reporting will often be superior because they understand what's going on. There is a scene in Control Room, that shows a BBC reporter in a Shia village in the south surrounded by kids chanting "Allah ilya Bush, Allah ilya Bush" and he informs the viewers that they are all cheering Bush for liberating them. What the kids are saying is "God damn Bush, God damn Bush".

Part of it may be all the liberals who signed on, unreservably to Kosovo (and who lie and say it had nothing to do with Clinton). Kosovo is something I have very mixed feelings about, it's a complicated subject, but one thing that should have been univerally denounced was the attack against the TV station. That TV station really was vile, it put out a crazed drumbeat of anti-Islamic polemics (it resembled FOX news at the moment) but it wasn't Hutu Power radio directing people to commit attrocities. One way or another, the people in there didn't deserve to die. Some people wondered where it would go. Well, here we are.

Interesting Chavez reaction

2005-11-25T13:40:00.000-08:00

Apparently Fox News rather than going the blog route of making up a bunch of garbage about Chavez the Devil, rather "informed" their demographic that this was all Bush's idea and he orchestrated the whole thing.

Now, I mean, he did in an incredibly backwards way bring all this about, ironically enough. I'm also not suprised by Fox telling it's viewers incredible lies, but what it does expose is that Chavez has them by the short hairs and that ChevronTexaco through it's mouthpiece Condi Rice doesn't want to hear any more bullshit from the usual suspects from the Contra era.

2005-11-20T07:24:00.000-08:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

heh

2005-11-20T05:58:00.000-08:00

Pamela!

I did run across Walcott talking about some talking about some Girls Gone Wild action over at the little ~~Pajamas Media~~ ~~Open Source Media~~ Whatever the Fuck They Are Today party.

I didn't pay much attention until I realized through one of their threads that the Girl Gone Wild was in fact Pamela from Atlas Shrugged.

She is otherwise famous for showing up at the Hitchens-Galloway blowhardathon and chanting like some deranged cultist: "Yes, I am a zionist, Yes, I am a zionist!". Now I'm going to confess, I've got a weakness for a strong drink, and I know Pamela is no teatotaller, so was that what was going on? Because no one out there on the planet believes that is a "thumbs-up" gesture, we have eyes.

Fallujah vs. Halabja

2005-11-18T16:44:00.000-08:00

Are we done?

This was about it. All there was left after you retreated away from the embarassing allegations that against any realistic look at Iraq that didn't involve Hussein given his long career as an American client ruler committing national and personal suicide by diverting some portion of what was left of his oil revenue into nuking America was this inane, wierd, anachronistic argument that he was a menace who used chemical weapons on his enemies and had to go (You need to ignore that at the time the U.S. not only didn't give a shit but sort of cheered him on and such).

At Halabja, Iraqi military units to suppress a Kurdish uprising used chemical weapons in the way they have always been used: to drive the opposition out of cover and cut them down. It's nasty and evil and I hope the devil gives the designers of all this along with it's participents a few extra pokes in their ass when they wind up in hell. The gas drove them out and helicopters made the greatest parts of the Grim Reaper's time sheet.

At Fallujah, there was the same damn thing. Same tactics, except given my druthers I'd take Sarin over the heavy WP smoke used for the same purpose. They were driven out (along with anyone within a tenth of a mile) and reduced using High Explosive mortar fire and conventional ammunition.

Bush, Hussein, there is little anymore to seperate the two. At least from an Iraqi perspective. This should be the absolute end of the spliced on "humanitarian" intervention and all anyone is left with are formulations about oil or being generous, trying to stay right and committing war crimes rather than just say "I fucked up".

Ok, I'm going to be a good blogger...

2005-11-18T13:50:00.000-08:00

Maybe.

I've got some time off and I'm going to make a resolution to ressurect this abortion.

Stay Tuned.

Poor kid..

2005-09-20T13:43:00.000-07:00

"Usamah Nabil, an Iraqi boy who is 10-year old, lives in Baghdad, the capital, suffers from a problem that he has no control over. But it has become affixed to him against his will, and despite attempts to rid himself of it. But as things are this problem accompanies him wherever he goes. His problem is not health-related, or social or humanitarian, but it is a problem of his appearance which resembles that of the US president George W. Bush to a large degree. To the point where his parents and friends in the street or school have stopped calling him by his real name, but call him "Bush." Usamah Nabil says he is not responsible for this problem of his look, and "that it is the will of God...who can create 40 resemblances [an Arab saying]...My father tells me to not get sick of this resemblance. Truthfully, I hate the name of Bush for many reasons; it is not one of the Arab or Islamic names, and he has killed many children in Iraq. I have tried to distance myself from the resemblance at school, but I quickly found that students call me by the name "Bush," and now I am perplexed because this name has become a synonym for me, and I wish to get rid of it in any way possible." As for his father who owns a shop in one of the suqs of Baghdad, he says:" My son Usamah has sharp intelligence, and works distinctively well in the shop that I own. But his problem is his appearance which resembles that of...Bush, to the point where customers have stopped calling him by his name, and call him "Little Bush," which greatly displeases him, and sometimes he embarrasses me with some customers when he attacks them with strong words in response to that name....He has started hating school due to him being called by the name of Bush...But I try to convince him that Bush will be forgotten after a few years, and only a few will remember him, and then he will live with your real name, and real appearance."

Irony is dead.

2005-09-18T11:33:00.000-07:00

Ah, yeah.

I was playing around with the idea of running this through photoshop, then I decided that there was little I could do to make the thing look more like a levee breaking.

How high are they?

2005-09-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

I guess we are going to sanction Venezuela for being "uncooperative".

Wait, maybe not.

However, the Bush administration said it would not impose sanctions on Venezuela, which is a major supplier of oil to the U.S. Drug czar John Walters said the sanctions waiver was needed to promote democracy in Venezuela.

What a joke. What exactly were we going to do? Quit buying their oil? End our "aid" which consists in it's totality of broadcasting anti-Chavez propaganda and a handful of DEA stooges? Who the hell even bothered with this nonsense.

McCain the moderate

2005-06-22T10:14:00.000-07:00

I saw John McCain on TV, this morning. He seemed to suggest that we should invade Syria. He didn't outright say that. He said, "We don't have to respect Syria's border". Well, what else was he suggesting? I hear otherwise reasonable people, I agree with politically 90% of the time talk about McCain as a "moderate". That's the CW.

He's a moderate who is probably the craziest warmonger in the senate. What have we come to in this country where you can espouse nutbag, crazier, than a shithouse rat ideas like taking out a new franchise war in the middle east. He was always nuts, he opposed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, for gods sake.

The TV tells me he is a moderate. You can be a delusional madman who aspires to build a new Rome but if you are a republican and the fundies don't like you, and you occasionally foray into campaign finance reporm, you are a moderate in this brave new world.

Downing Street Memo

2005-06-14T10:41:00.000-07:00

Ok, so it's not exactly a shock that Bush's people were making things up and trying to sell Iraq. At one point I remember that there was some sticker shock about the $200 megabux that Lindsey pointed out that the thing would cost and they slashed the price down to $50 million like it was W's Crazy Used War Lot. Before the thing even started they were using forgeries to try and build their case and they knew they were using forgeries. Their mendacity is pretty well established.

Blair, however, has come as a shock. It shouldn't have. I remember reading something by Chomsky where he said that the UK has about the same amount of domestic control of it's foreign policy as the Ukraine (it dated before the breakup of the Soviet Union). Now of course, I was never a good sensible liberal that hated Chomsky's guts but I thought that was probably unnecessary exageration. About December of 2001, back when Afghanistan was the show I did understood there was a group of players who were really, really, trying to get into Iraq and I asked a friend from the UK if Blair would go along with it. Jack Straw at the time was making the most pitiful noises and you could tell they didn't want any part of this. My friend said "If Americans voted in Darth Vader and President Vader invaded Europe, Blair would say "Some say you must chose between America and Europe and I say they are mistaken"" I still didn't believe it.

It looks like I wasn't cynical enough. I'm here assuming that the whole thing is a huge sinister mix of revenge, religious zionism, oil, defense contracts and I still wasn't cynical enough to think that Tony Blair very literally didn't have the ability to say no to Iraq. Apparently, he knew damn well that it was all fixed, he knew it was unplanned, knew it was going to be a total mess, and still did it. Given that reality, I can only conclude that there was no exageration, that the UK really is Airstrip One, Blair really is on a leash. Says some things about the limits of democracy outside the hegemon, I think.